Last week, I attended my fourth System, Software, SoC and Silicon Degug conference (S4D) in a row. I think the silicon part is getting less attention these days, most of the papers were on how to debug software. Often with the help of hardware, and with an angle to how software runs in SoCs and systems. I presented a paper reviewing the technology and history of reverse debugging, which went down pretty well.
Tag: S4D
Paper & Talk at S4D 2012: Reverse Debug
I am going to the S4D conference for the third year in a row. This year, I have a paper on reverse debugging, reviewing the technology, products, and history of the idea. I will probably write a longer blog post after the conference, interesting things tend to come up.
S4D 2011 Submission Time
The submissions for S4D 2011 is now open, at http://www.ecsi.org/s4d/submissions. I have been to S4D for two years now, and I find it one of the most interesting conferences around. It is a nice mix of hardware design and software tools, all directed at the fundamental problem of how to debug a digital system. To me, it is the “debug conference” par excellence.
If you have something interesting to submit, please do. I won’t have time myself to write something for this year, unfortunately.
S4D 2010 Part 2
My previous post on S4D did omit some of my notes from the conference. In particular, the very entertaining and serious keynote of Barry Lock from Lauterbach and some more philosophical observations on the nature of debugging.
Continue reading “S4D 2010 Part 2”
S4D 2010
Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.
Additional Notes on Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints
This post features some additional notes on the topic of transporting bugs with checkpoints, which is the subject of a paper at the S4D 2010 conference.
The idea of transporting bugs with checkpoints is some ways obvious. If you have a checkpoint of a state, of course you move it. Right? However, changing how you think about reporting bugs takes time. There are also some practical issues to be resolved. The S4D paper goes into some of the aspects of making checkpointing practical.
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S4D Paper on Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints
I have a paper about “Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints” to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right. See the longer Wind River blog posting about this topic for a few more details.
The S4D Debug Conference
An unplanned and unexpected bonus with my trip to the FDL 2009 conference was the co-located S4D conference. S4D means System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug, and is a conference that has grown out of some recent workshops on the topic of debugging, as seen from the perspective of hardware designers (mostly). S4D was part of the same package as FDL and DASIP, entrance to one conference got you into the other two too. As I did not know about S4D until quite late in the process, this was a great opportunity for me to look at what they were doing.